There are some violators who seem to lived charmed lives. They not only blatantly violate the game laws; they brag about it also...and get away with it. One such man I'll call Shorty. He was a miserable little man with an awful history. He had been a convicted felon after shooting at a police officer. Felons cannot possess firearms. He had served some time and then been granted a new trial eliminating his conviction. In the time awaiting the new trial his legal status was up in the air and he'd hunted deer with impunity. He was rumored to have killed dozens of bucks each year, often shooting them when they were in velvet, cutting off the antlers and selling them into the Asian market in which they are used for some supposed medicinal purposes.
Though he lived out of my sector, his name was pretty well known. After getting a rash of complaints about him. I ran his criminal history and found that he had plead out to the felony taking time served as his penalty. Now he was again a convicted felon and could not lawfully possess a firearm; all we had to do was catch him. I started making the rounds of gun shops, checking their records to see if they might have sold him a gun. It was a tedious process and many hours of labor yielded nothing.
One rainy Sunday morning, I was catching up on paperwork, delivering court paperwork to some judges I knew I'd catch home--just puttering away a rainy day--and saw that my friend Frank was at his gun shop, which is normally closed on Sunday. He smiled when I came in and said "Guess who was just in?" Never being a great one for riddles, I just shrugged my shoulders. He smiled, went into a storage area and came out with an old pump shotgun. He handed it to me and said "your buddy Shorty, and look what I bought from him!" Shorty had come in trying to sell a few guns and Frank, a good sportsman himself and knowing my interest in bagging Shorty, bought the gun he could get for the least money. (He figured he might get it back after court; but might he might not. We worked it our so that he did.) He had also documented the other guns in Shorty's possession so we had lots of information upon which to get a search warrant. My lazy Sunday had become pretty busy all of a sudden.
We knocked on Shorty's door about dawn a few mornings later. When all was said and done we had a few more guns and Shorty in cuffs. We managed to get him in jail for the entire fall, so our work surely saved some bucks from an untimely demise.
...and he thought he was outsmarting us.
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